Friday, December 17, 2010

Community members watching recent JBossWS subversion repository activity might have noticed that we've been having two open 3.4.x branches for quite some time. What's the meaning of that?

From one of the branches, JBossWS 3.4.0 was released just last week and had many new features, available for already released AS containers (including AS 6 CR1 and AS 5.1.0.GA). That came with JAXWS 2.2, JSR 109 v1.3, etc. - you can read all the details on my previous blog post.

On the other side, the efforts above on webservices technologies are of course meant for eventually satisfying the general JBoss Application Server EE6 certification needs. Because of that, a lot of work is being done on JBoss AS 6 trunk. In particular we had to review part of the internal webservice integration layer with the AS, to accommodate other components requirements and changes. This all happened on the branches for JBossWS 3.4.1, which has finally been released on yesterday and is ready for being the final ws stack of JBoss Application Server 6.So 3.4.1 basically introduces just few minor additions over 3.4.0 for the end users (see the release notes [1][2]), but includes some internal changes that are really relevant for AS 6. Besides that, we verified the testsuite with IPv6 addresses ;-)The only supported target container for 3.4.1 is the current JBoss AS 6.0.0-SNAPSHOT, which (hopefully) will soon turn into AS 6 final.

The future: JBossWS 4 and JBoss AS 7

So, what are we going to work on once we're back from X-mas time? ;-)You might have heard on the November 17th JBoss Community Asylum that AS 7 development is really on... well, it's time for the WS team to focus on it.Major new features and changes are coming with JBossWS 4... take a look at JIRA, the dev forum and feel free to comment/participate :-)

This release is the result of the hard work since the beginning of 2010 on supporting the JAXWS 2.2 and JSR 109 v.1.3 changes required for JavaEE 6. Part of the work actually came through collaboration with the Apache CXF community; as a matter of fact the Apache CXF 2.3 series (included in JBossWS-CXF 3.4.0) features JAXWS 2.2 compliant functionalities.

JBossWS-CXF 3.4.0 is meant for being the stack providing webservices functionalities to JBoss AS 6, which in turns aims at JavaEE 6 compliance. We're going to cut another minor release for dealing with last minute integration issues just before AS goes final, but from a feature point of view 3.4.0 already has all you need for JavaEE 6 webservices development.

Besides that, JBossWS-CXF 3.4.0 comes with all the new features and many bug fixes of Apache CXF 2.3.0 and 2.3.1, part of which were directly contributed by our team members.Take a look at the release notes for the full list of improvements.Of course, the Maven artifacts for all the released components are also available on the JBoss public repository; please give 3.4.0 a try!